Bring
Me the Head of Silvino Herrera"Us
vs. Them" and Other "Modern" Myths of War and Civilization

by Daniel Patrick
Welchwww.dissidentvoice.org
July 14, 2004

They
behead -- we do it with smart bombs. There is, of course, an ugly truth to
this recently minted axiom: the horror of state terrorism is that the
overwhelming machinery of death in the hands of all-powerful governments far
outweighs individual atrocities by madmen, groupuscules and non-state
entities. While the heathen thugs and killers may indeed be barbarians, such
an axiom tacitly concedes, with their beheadings and murders of innocents,
it is almost impossible to accomplish the slaughter of half a million
children, as did the Anglo-American/UN sanctions in Iraq, with such amateur
methods.

This is the same reasoning which, fairly convincingly, puts the lie to a
sanitized concept of war and destruction which makes the self-satisfied
"West" so smug and confident of its moral superiority. There is an
underlying, and often overt, racism which allows so-called "modern" war
makers and their electorates to tolerate the huge disparities in casualties
that have come to define modern conflict. In virtually every case, the
brutal repression of movements toward greater human freedom, workers'
rights, and a life worth living is ignored, while the "atrocities" of those
trying to resist are seen as backward and evidence of cultural and moral
inferiority.

However, one problem is not just that the disparity in terror torpedoes the
moral superiority argument. It is true that the 20th century was indeed the
most horrific; unbeknownst to most lay observers: at its dawn, 90% of war
dead were combatants and 10% non-combatants. By its end, the ratio was
reversed, making it the most deadly and arguably least "advanced" century in
human history. True also, the machinery of war, with its amoral measurements
in "kilomorts," the chemistry of napalm to stick to human skin and burn,
phosphorous and gas, cluster munitions--not to mention the almost surreal
evil of neutron bomb technology, meant to kill people while leaving
buildings intact-all this shows that the actual brutality of burning flesh
and exploding body parts is in no way less barbaric than other methods. The
United States gets no props from the rest of the "civilized" world for
instituting the pain-free technology of lethal injection to a practice most
governments consider a barbarous anachronism.

When we peel away all the layers of burning flesh, all the carefully
constructed fiction of human progress and benefits of science and
technology, we must face a reality perhaps even more grim. It is not merely
us standing cynically by, wringing our hands while they hack each other to
death with machetes, as when almost a million Tutsis died in Rwanda. There
simply is no us vs. them. The side claiming to represent progress, the March
of History and the fulfillment of the human desire for freedom and
self-rule, has done more and done worse, using as low-tech and brutal
methods on both sides of the technological and cultural divide. There is a
famous photo, not of Nick Berg, not of John the Baptist, but of Servino
Herrera, one of the lieutenants in Augusto Sandino's resistance army.
Rather, it is a photo of a US Marine -- the only part of Sr. Herrera showing
is his head, held triumphantly aloft by the conquering hero of the few and
the proud. Turns out we behead, too.

When I was in Nicaragua, I heard testimony of the victims of Somoza's
National Guard, women with their breasts cut off, left alive and maimed on
purpose to terrorize their families. Resistance fighters and supporters,
union organizers -- whatever -- killed with their genitals cut off and
stuffed in their mouths. Victims forced at gunpoint to swallow a button on a
string while laughing guardsmen kept trying to pull it up. Like all the
henchmen throughout Latin America, these murderers, nun-rapists, "deplaners"
(who simply pushed terror victims out of a moving plane to their
unacknowledged deaths), clown-killers and assorted scum received training
and backing from the CIA, the Pentagon, and the dreaded School of the
Americas. As FDR, hero of the US mainstream left, once bragged: "Somoza may
be a son-of-a-bitch, but he's our son-of-a-bitch." Turns out we do all that
other stuff, too.

Likewise, I had mostly considered the shot of triumphant soldiers standing
atop a pile of bones of the conquered dead to be mainly a cartoon
representation. Wrong again--the only true such photo I have ever seen was
of US soldiers in the Philippines at the turn of the 20th century, when over
a half million Filipinos were slaughtered in the successful attempt to
secure the islands for American Empire. The scene is repeated ad nauseum in
US history, in murderous rampages across our own continent from Sea to
Shining Sea, through Central America, the Caribbean, and the Pacific.
Despite George Bush's audacity and isolation, there is absolutely nothing
new about Iraq. Conquest, pacification, occupation and the transfer of
"sovereignty" to a puppet government is the textbook M.O. The only phase yet
to be completed is the few decades in which the world is supposed to forget
the origins of the dictatorship, after which US forces return to suppress
rebellion or resistance movements and install democracy, as if the cycle had
no beginning.

In this context, it is almost unbearable to hear the shallow, mind-deadening
"debate" between Democrats and Republicans about "how to handle" Iraq, not
to mention the infrastructure of organized theft that transfers trillions of
dollars from South to North, from Labor to Capital, from poor to rich, from
brown to white. To my mind, there are three crises--allowing for some
consolidation and overlap--which surpass all else in their urgency today.
They can be summarized as Empire (by which we include Iraq/Israel-Palestine,
Venezuela/Colombia and the rest), WalMart and the crushing of labor, with
its attendant rape of the national treasury and the health care system, and
the Prison State, whereby incarceration is abetting and supplanting vote
suppression, the Klan and slavery as the New Racist Ideology.

These are, of course, big problems. They are, however, exploding problems,
and ones which threaten the very existence of humankind (combined with the
rapacious consumerism which holds the lot together). Just the kind of
all-encompassing issues one might foolishly expect a national election
campaign to address. This huge history, soaked with blood and death for the
benefit of profit and oligarchy, is completely unconcerned with the party
hacks nibbling at its corners, unthreatened by the sorry excuse for
"ideology" and "values" espoused by the political and economic system it
nurtured and generated. Self-delusional, feel-good bromides about the
"greatness of America" and a willful suppression and misrepresentation of
our history will seal the deal, and we will plummet headlong into the
looming environmental catastrophe that is waiting to engulf us all.

As a young pupil celebrating America's Bicentennial, I remember being
paraded in a choral production called "Our Country 'tis of Thee." One lyric
that still sticks in my mind and in my craw, sung by our chorus of
mind-controlled, ignorant, chirpy 6th graders:

There's a peaceful sky in my backyard
Far away from fear and doubt
But the whole wide world is my hometown
And I've gotta help my neighbor out

There's a peacefull sky in my backyard
Far away from a far off land
But the whole wide world is my hometown
When freedom needs a helping hand

Thinking about it today still makes my skin crawl with embarrassment and
self-loathing, even though I was only eleven. Sort of like a post traumatic
lapse for a former cult member. Lack of self-doubt combined with ignorance
of one's history is perhaps the most dangerous combination known to
humankind. Torture at Abu Ghraib is not the tip of the iceberg; it is simply
the latest link in the chain. Facing that history head on, with the
disillusionment, fear and doubt that rationality and honesty implies, is the
sobering task of those who would resist the current onslaught. It is the
first step in a long, long road to sanity, and it is not a comfortable one.
As Rosa Luxemburg famously remarked, "it will always be the most
revolutionary act to say the truth out loud."